Earlier this month, UMBC joined dozens of other founding institutions at the kick-off meeting of a newly launched initiative to ensure sustained resources and opportunities in tech fields for women of color.

The effort, called the Action Collaborative on Transforming Trajectories for Women of Color in Tech, is organized by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and guided by the findings and recommendations detailed in a 2022 National Academies report. According to the report, while women of color make up a substantial and growing percentage of the female population in the United States, they earn a small percentage of computing degrees, and remain significantly underrepresented in the tech workforce.

UMBC has a history of success running programs, such the nationally recognized Meyerhoff Scholars Program and the Center for Women in Technology, that work to advance equity and inclusion and increase diversity among future leaders in science, technology, engineering, and related fields.

“Tech jobs are a vital part of our society,” says Anupam Joshi, the acting dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology at UMBC. “We need to tap the entire talent base of the country to fill these jobs.” 

UMBC’s efforts as part of the action collaborative will be a continuation of the university’s commitment to supporting students from underrepresented groups as they pursue technical education, he says. “UMBC has a solid foundation that we can build on.”

The action collaborative will offer participating institutions—representing higher education, national laboratories, and government—a platform to exchange ideas and promising practices for increasing the recruitment, retention, and advancement in tech fields of women who identify as African American, Black, Hispanic, Latina, Native American, Asian American, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander. 

The action collaborative’s member institutions will collaborate over the coming four years to share novel, promising, and evidence-based practices, discuss and advance research priorities, share data collection practices, and more.

“This initiative will require dedication and collaboration from all of us,” said National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt, in a press release. “We are committed to facilitating research, collaboration, and action that reflect the representation and lived experiences of women of color, in hopes of driving substantial change in the tech and engineering ecosystem.”

More information can be found on the action collaborative’s website.

Earlier this month, UMBC joined dozens of other founding institutions at the kick-off meeting of a newly launched initiative to ensure sustained resources and opportunities in tech fields for women of color.

The effort, called the Action Collaborative on Transforming Trajectories for Women of Color in Tech, is organized by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and guided by the findings and recommendations detailed in a 2022 National Academies report. According to the report, while women of color make up a substantial and growing percentage of the female population in the United States, they earn a small percentage of computing degrees, and remain significantly underrepresented in the tech workforce.

UMBC has a history of success running programs, such the nationally recognized Meyerhoff Scholars Program and the Center for Women in Technology, that work to advance equity and inclusion and increase diversity among future leaders in science, technology, engineering, and related fields.

“Tech jobs are a vital part of our society,” says Anupam Joshi, the acting dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology at UMBC. “We need to tap the entire talent base of the country to fill these jobs.” 

UMBC’s efforts as part of the action collaborative will be a continuation of the university’s commitment to supporting students from underrepresented groups as they pursue technical education, he says. “UMBC has a solid foundation that we can build on.”

The action collaborative will offer participating institutions—representing higher education, national laboratories, and government—a platform to exchange ideas and promising practices for increasing the recruitment, retention, and advancement in tech fields of women who identify as African American, Black, Hispanic, Latina, Native American, Asian American, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander. 

The action collaborative’s member institutions will collaborate over the coming four years to share novel, promising, and evidence-based practices, discuss and advance research priorities, share data collection practices, and more.

“This initiative will require dedication and collaboration from all of us,” said National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt, in a press release. “We are committed to facilitating research, collaboration, and action that reflect the representation and lived experiences of women of color, in hopes of driving substantial change in the tech and engineering ecosystem.”

More information can be found on the action collaborative’s website.

Many recent artificial intelligence (AI) breakthroughs—such as smartphone tools that recognize your friends’ faces or understand your spoken commands—are based on a computing approach that was first dreamed up nearly 80 years ago. Called neural networks, the approach loosely mimics the way biological brains work. For decades, it was a quixotic idea with results that fell far short of the power of human brains. Yet starting in the early 2000s, the technique took off. What changed? In short, computers finally got fast enough (and training data plentiful enough) for neural networks to realize their hoped-for potential.

The story of neural networks illustrates a key principle in computer science: the power of any computing technique is bound by the capabilities of the hardware that runs it. Improving that hardware is a major research focus for Chenchen Liu, an assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering at UMBC. Liu was recently awarded a prestigious NSF CAREER award totaling nearly $540,000 that will fund her efforts over the next five years to advance the next generation of powerful computer chips.

As society continues to engage with the implications of the latest commercial iterations of AI, research efforts such as Liu’s are looking ahead to an even newer wave of applications, including self-driving cars, immersive virtual reality, and AI-assisted agriculture. These new applications often require separate neural networks—for example, an image recognition system and a collision avoidance system, to share information and work together. 

Working with students and colleagues, Liu is studying how modifications to state-of-the-art AI chips could make such coordination easier.

UMBC News asked Liu about her research, the NSF CAREER award, the future of AI, and the need for responsible AI use. 

UMBC News: What are some of the main challenges holding back next-generation AI applications?

Liu: In next-gen AI applications, machines are faced with a complex composition of multiple tasks, requiring them to run multiple AI models simultaneously. And not only do the models need to run at the same time, they need to share information from one to the other. The computing needs of the models may be different. Some models may need a lot of computing power, others may need a lot of memory. It becomes very difficult to coordinate these distinct resource needs on a single computing platform and to run everything in parallel and as efficiently as possible.

UMBC News: What are some ways that you plan to tackle these challenges in your NSF CAREER-funded research?

Liu: We first need to map the interactions of the different models and understand what computing resources they need and how they work together. We then plan to investigate a novel computer chip architecture designed to support these interactions. We will look for ways to flexibly schedule tasks and allocate computing power and memory so the system can operate differently for different scenarios. Eventually, we will integrate these techniques into a comprehensive framework that could be widely applied to various next-gen AI applications.

UMBC News: What are you the most excited about in your work?

Liu: I believe an incredible increase in AI complexity will be the next big thing in the world, and I am excited to become a small part of it. The increase in complexity comes with an urgent need for novel computer architecture to support it. Since the first computer was invented, people have been trying to optimize computing performance. Now with AI, current computing resources cannot meet the requirements caused by larger and larger volumes of data. A lot of researchers are working on novel computing architectures to improve performance and I am happy to be one of them.

UMBC News: Do you see a lot of opportunities for students in the field?  

Liu: AI is changing everything in the world now. You can hear about job opportunities in Silicon Valley or with new AI start-ups nowadays, indicating a thriving new era of careers centered on AI computing. This trend is also shaping the interests of students on campus. They want to work on projects with AI components and we offer opportunities like that in many of our classes. It’s not only an opportunity for students, but also an opportunity for us to review our course development and career guidance. 

UMBC News: What do you think is the future of AI?

Liu: The overall feeling is one of awe. Just like the first word carved on stone and the first rocket launched to the sky, AI is another milestone in human history. It marks humankind’s exploration of intelligence itself, asking questions about how it is formed and how it might evolve.

We should proceed cautiously, since AI is also strong enough now to challenge human intelligence and even deceive us. Many governments have made calls to regulate it.

I believe in a few years, we will have every perspective of our world reshaped by AI, with clear impacts on the economy and society. 

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men other than skin cancer, with more than 288,000 new cases diagnosed every year, according to the American Cancer Society. The disease’s fatality rate has decreased by more than half since the 1990s, but there is still room for progress—especially in treating or preventing advanced, metastatic disease, which is much more likely to be fatal.

A new paper published in Science Advances, led by a team of UMBC researchers, clarifies how an enzyme called SMYD3 may be involved in prostate cancer’s progression to a more dangerous and aggressive stage. The enzyme’s newly confirmed role makes it a prime potential drug target for preventing metastatic disease.

Redefining an enzyme’s role

Researchers have been trying to explain SMYD3’s role in cancer since observing that it is unusually abundant in cancerous tumors, explains Erin Green, associate professor of biological sciences and senior author on the paper.

Previous studies suggested that SMYD3 acted inside a cell’s nucleus and regulated which genes the cell expressed by directly modifying DNA. But research led by Nicolas Reynoird, a scientist at the Institute for Advanced Biosciences in Grenoble, France, and a co-author on the new study, suggested a different mechanism.

In a key 2014 paper published while Reynoird was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, he and collaborators found that SMYD3 was working outside the nucleus and activating a protein called a MAP kinase. Members of the MAP kinase protein family are overactive in cancer cells and can promote tumor growth.

The new Science Advances paper, led by Sabeen Ikram, Ph.D. ’23, biological sciences, built on Reynoird’s previous work. Ikram’s experiments showed conclusively and in more detail how SMYD3 may be triggering metastatic prostate cancer via the MAP kinase signaling pathway. The paper ties together an overabundance of SMYD3 and excessive activation of MAP kinase signaling for the first time in prostate cancer, renewing interest in SMYD3 as a therapeutic target for prostate cancer.  

The new study also revealed that SMYD3 regulates a particular protein, vimentin, that is well-studied as a marker of cancer progression. Plus, the team found for the first time that SMYD3 creates a positive feedback loop in the cell, where high levels of SMYD3 contribute to maintaining its overabundance. The study’s findings relied on experiments conducted in cell lines and in mice; the latter were led by UMBC Ph.D. student Apurv Rege.

Pioneering and independent

Today, Ikram is building on her experiences at UMBC and thriving as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford in Or Gozani’s research group. Her work on the new paper was critical to its success.

“She’s extremely motivated, focused, and was really excited about the project. She just got a lot done,” Green says. “It was a new area of research for my lab, and Sabeen was willing to be independent and pioneering in getting these different types of experiments set up and figuring out what to do.”

The positive feelings are mutual. “Dr. Green’s mentorship has helped me transform from this timid, aspiring graduate student into a confident, independent scientist today,” Ikram shares. “She never stopped believing in me, especially at the times when I didn’t.”

Ikram even took unexpected challenges during her Ph.D. journey in stride. She was thrilled to travel to France for a stint with Reynoird’s research group in January 2020. Ikram planned to return in March, but had to stay until July and couldn’t enter the lab for much of that time due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Navigating 2020 was indeed difficult for all of us, but the adverse circumstances cultivated stronger friendships and working relationships” with her French colleagues, Ikram shares.

A new direction and new hope for patients

With Ikram at Stanford, and other lab members actively at work on other projects, Green is currently seeking new team members to continue this exciting line of research—and there are many avenues to explore.

“We’ve only checked this mechanism in prostate cancer so far, but I think it’s likely happening in other cancer cell types,” Green says. “That’s another thing that we want to keep investigating: How common is this?”

Green is also excited for SMYD3’s potential use as a therapeutic target for prostate or other cancers. SMYD3 inhibitors already exist, so the new findings may encourage companies to invest in discovering new uses for them.

“There’s drugs out there that haven’t been fully explored because people decided there was not a good target.” Green says. “So there’s a lot more that could be done there.”

UMBC’s Science Learning Collaboratory buzzes with activity as small groups of students use pipettes to suck brine shrimp out of glass vials, squirt them into petri dishes set over graph paper, then stare intently at the wriggling shrimp while running stopwatches and recording data. They’ll then analyze the data using Excel and write up a laboratory report.

It may not sound like a math class, but this is a typical day in MATH 110: Math in Action, a new laboratory course for non-STEM majors who haven’t taken calculus.

The course, which launched this fall, is a UMBC innovation designed for students “who don’t generally have the most positive association with math,” says lead lab instructor Alexis O’Malley ’18, mathematics and psychology. “But personally,” she adds, “I believe everyone can benefit from some math in their life, so this course is trying to show how different math concepts are applied across various fields.”

Lara Scott, a mathematics Ph.D. student who teaches the lecture portion of the class, concurs. “The hope is that by showing students how prevalent math is in every subject,” Scott says, “they will begin to make those connections themselves and those connections will inspire them to independently wonder how certain concepts can be explained mathematically.”

Empowering students with math

Each week, the students attend Scott’s lecture, then participate in a lab session where they apply what they learned in hands-on activities. The labs are co-designed by O’Malley and a rotating cast of faculty members from departments across the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS). As one might expect, faculty in mathematics and statistics contributed, and so did professors in biological sciences, chemistry and biochemistry, and physics, each exploring math concepts through their own discipline’s lens.   

Lab topics include progressive tax rates and mortgage interest rates, the chemistry of mixing dyes for cake icing, card and dice games to learn probability, and more. Chuck Bieberich,professor of biological sciences, co-led the brine shrimp lab, which focused on calculating distance and velocity. William R. LaCourse, dean of CNMS and professor of chemistry and biochemistry, developed a lab where the students built and used clinometers, simple mechanical devices for estimating the height of tall objects, such as trees or buildings. 

More than a year before he was teaching in MATH 110, LaCourse saw a need for a more interactive math course and began advocating for its creation. Kathleen Hoffman, professor of mathematics and associate dean in CNMS, came on board and worked with the math department to move the course forward. The resulting class is but one example of the many CNMS courses instructors have reimagined to promote active learning and engage students who otherwise might not take an interest in the natural sciences.

“Math is everywhere, and a math lab course creates opportunities for students to interact with the material in fresh, creative ways,” LaCourse says. “MATH 110 is about empowering students to make decisions and analyze situations in their daily lives—whether they’re critically evaluating statistics in the media or doubling a recipe.”

Swapping fear for fun in math class

The course is personal for O’Malley, who did not always love math herself. “I thought I was bad at it, and I hated doing things I was bad at,” she candidly recalls. “It wasn’t the math itself, it was the feeling that I had in a math class—which is how it is for a lot of people.”

A fortuitous sequence of events, including a campus job helping with professional development events for math teachers, led O’Malley from initially pursuing an English degree at UMBC to a combination of math and psychology majors as a Sherman Teacher Scholar. After that, O’Malley set out to make math courses less of a bear for her math-phobic students—and maybe even fun.

She first returned to UMBC as an adjunct professor for introductory calculus while still teaching math at Western Technical High School in Baltimore County. She now serves as a program management specialist in CNMS, and the opportunity to continue her passion—teaching math—in that role came as a delightful surprise.

Unlike calculus, where the curriculum is largely set, MATH 110 “is a growing, evolving, living course,” O’Malley says. “This lab is new and has the potential to always be new. I’m really excited about it.”

Learning to think like a mathematician

O’Malley and Scott have both witnessed substantial growth in their students this fall. Each lab report asks students to connect their work to previous labs, STEM fields, and their own lives. “That’s one of my favorite sections to read, because they always come up with examples I never would have thought of,” O’Malley says. “Sometimes they take away something that has even more depth than was my intention.”

The investigative nature of the course also supported students’ increasingly independent problem solving. Later in the semester, “Suddenly, students weren’t walking up with a blank page and asking for help, but instead explaining where they started and the specific point where they couldn’t bridge the gap on their own,” Scott shares.

As for lightbulb moments, “I wish that I had cataloged them,” O’Malley says. “But I remember their ‘aha!’ faces.”

By the end, “even in the labs where students struggled with the math, they could easily explain why and how the lab related to their life,” Scott says. “For students who won’t continue in the math field, it’s pretty incredible to watch them (sometimes begrudgingly) accept how intertwined mathematics is with our world.”

Changing minds, creating opportunities

During the last few weeks of the fall semester, rather than conducting faculty-designed labs, the students are developing their own. Next semester, the curriculum will incorporate one of the students’ labs. That process will continue, and eventually, with enough different labs to choose from, the course might become adaptable to the interests of students each semester, O’Malley says.

The spring course is filling up, which speaks to its positive reception with students. If that section fills, the college will open another. A more advanced math laboratory course is also in the early stages of development.

The new course is already opening students’ eyes to what a math class can be.

“I didn’t think you could do math and lab at the same time,” shares Taye Olorunsola ’25, management of aging services, who took a chance on the new course this fall. But now? “I recommend it to a lot of my friends.”

It makes sense that in a space on campus intentionally left green, wooded, and, well sacred, there would be someplace to sit, and under that bench there would be a notebook waiting for you, along with a writing implement. Your thoughts are the last ingredient for the moment.

Since the founding of the Joseph Beuys Sculpture Park on the Knoll in the southwest corner of the Loop in 2001, UMBC community members have been writing in journals tucked under benches from Nature Sacred—an organization that hopes to promote a connection to nature through journaling and contemplation spaces throughout America.

Sandra Abbott, curator of collections and outreach at the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture (CADVC), has collected and replaced many dozens of the journals as part of her role at UMBC. “Journaling is a very intimate medium. People pour their hearts out in them here just like they would a personal diary tucked under their pillow,” says Abbott, who shares the journals with Nature Sacred and also uploads the texts to CADVC’s website.

“After reading 15 years of journal entries from our site, I can say a significant number of these entries are rife with emotion— whether a writer is waxing on about their newfound love or heartfully responding to someone else’s heartbreak—the moment spent physically writing in a book and in one’s own hand is powerful.”

Maybe you confessed a budding romance in those pages yourself. Maybe you questioned your major, or just drew a funny picture. The filled and empty journals alike call to Retrievers to make their mark on the pages, and in the world.

At UMBC, we’re still young enough to be making traditions. Meet Thomas Locastro, biological sciences alumnus, who knew from day one on campus in 2003 that he wanted to leave behind a lasting legacy.

Locastro joined the newly-made First Year Council, designed to help students view themselves as co-creators of our campus community. “They were encouraging us to pick something to do,” Locastro explains. “How do you leave your mark?”

Locastro brainstormed an idea that would be exciting for students but still relatively inexpensive, and therefore hopefully repeatable. He landed on a bonfire. In the center of campus.

Understandably, there were some roadblocks. But Locastro had staff members to champion his idea. Jen Dress, then the coordinator for the students events board, was integral to the process. “We are really dedicated to figuring things out when students come to us with dreams to make things happen,” says Dress, now director of engagement for Campus Life.

The other MVP, says Locastro, is Glen Cook, a member of the grounds crew who collects pallets leading up to the fire and is always trying to make the conflagration bigger and better (while staying safe).

“I talked to so many people before I found the right people to really push the idea forward for approval with me,” Locastro says. Since the first bonfire in 2004, Locastro has attended every lighting since.

“I’ve flown back from Saudi Arabia to make this event,” Locastro says. “I’ve flown back from Monaco. I’ve flown back from a lot of places in the U.S. I’ve never missed it.” 

Thousands of students have warmed their hands at the last 19 years of bonfires. What tradition will you start at UMBC?

University Communications and Marketing social media intern Allison John ’24, psychology, isn’t only interested in Instagram engagement and sharing campus treasures—she’s also passionate about the creative process that brings a dancer’s performance to life. After watching this year’s Fall Dance Showcase, John sat down with one of the senior choreographers to learn more about her art.

When you listen to a song, what immediately comes to your mind? Eva McLaughlin ’24, dance, said this is exactly the story of how her choreography comes to life. 

Every senior dance major at UMBC is required to create or perform a final piece to graduate. Two to five student dancers will work with a choreographer to pick a variety of songs to tell a story of their choosing. For McLaughlin, when she hears a song, she immediately begins to imagine a story or sometimes a phrase, and from there, her process starts. 

This year was different from others as her piece was centered around research she conducted as part of an Undergraduate Research Award (URA). McLaughlin’s research centered on misophonia, a neurological condition characterized by an intense aversion to certain auditory stimuli. The dance piece was created in order to pull the audience into the reality of people who have misophonia. The dance depicted scenes of panic attacks and the image of a “fight or flight” response. 

Transforming on the stage

When a choreographer first hears their music, their mind begins to shift through different visions of how their piece could be interpreted. McLaughlin described her choreography as being about the connections between dancers, and less about the counts or the logistics of a dance. 

“When I choreograph relationships, I create them based on touch and feelings. It makes their relationship feel more genuine on stage,” she says. Each dance has a story to tell and the responsibility of a choreographer is to guide their dancers in how they want this story to be delivered. 

McLaughlin is not only a choreographer, she is also a dancer. Dance is an incredibly intense sport because it requires a dancer to focus on each precise movement. This is not only about their performance on stage, but about what they imagine as they stretch before a performance, the way their facial expressions depict their emotions, and how sharp their movements are. When these dancers walk on stage, they transform—in that moment they are not simply themselves—they are part of this elaborate story. Each audience member understands the story differently, depending on the dancers and how they chose to deliver a piece. McLaughlin describes this feeling as something unlike any other. 

Showcasing a different side

When dancing, McLaughlin is telling someone else’s story, and it’s important to remember that story as you dance. As she described her own piece, she said that, “it wasn’t a dance that was meant to be pretty” but instead, she wanted the audience to be brought into the reality of those who live with misophonia. 

“When I’m performing, it feels like I’m in a different reality. In that moment, I’m a part of someone else’s story, and I’m able to showcase another side of myself that most people don’t get to see.” 

The passion behind every choreographer and dancer is what makes each piece so unique. In the months leading up to the performance, each dancer is in some way intertwined with this story. They carry the responsibility to deliver it to the audience and hope that each person who comes in contact with this piece leaves feeling impacted by it in some way.